60 Eureka Moments From Think Visibility 7 (#thinkvis)

This weekend saw the 7th Think Visibility conference with a mixture of presentations and networking. From Analytics, to video, branding to SEO the conference took in a lot of different streams and provided a fantastic insight into what you should be doing for each of these disciplines.

For those who didn’t attend, or who want a recap, we’ve compiled our favourite tips of the day.

There were also the usual party events with a Weakest Link style quiz alongside two nights of networking and drinks. Dom Hodgson pulled off another fantastic event and it’s great to hear the next two Thinkvis events have already been scheduled (with another additional event potentially coming soon).

As the conference was in two streams, myself and Anna did our best to see as many as we could, alongside both speaking at the event. Below are the tips we found useful for the talks we attended. We also welcome any more comments from attendees below.

– It is very safe for Google to use brands in their results, as customers have already proved they are a good result by shopping there.

– It’s easier for brands to get PR and be promoted by journalists, as many will go direct to big brands for quotes.

– Google could get a good indication of how big brands are by looking at the amount of branded traffic. They can also see keyword brand traffic (e.g. Admiral insurance) and this gives a good association.

– The black hole effect – When a site draws a lot of clicks in the results, no matter where it ranks in the list. Helps show it as a brand and is a great way to get more views regardless of top five placement.

– Exact match domains rank really well as the anchor text links they have make it appear like a brand and one that is highly relevant.

– If you can’t get links from a high profile site then view related sites to find more achievable ones.

– Use Buzz Stream to build lists of sites to target as you browse the Internet so you can approach them later.

– Use the Seomoz API and Linkscape to pull URL data so you can decide which site is best when performing outreach.

– When you want a link, you need to think “what does the blogger want from this, and what is in it for the readers? The blogger has to get traffic and their readers have to be happy. Everyone has to win.

– Scrape lists of blogs and then use SEO tools for excel to find out on page information about them.

– Try to email from a company email address.

– Use Google Docs importxml feature to scrape information from pages (see slides for formula). Scrape lists of blogs and then use SEO tools for Excel to find out on page information about them. Build a list of link prospects that you can go back to over time try to email from a company email address.

– YouTube gets 4 billion visits per day (Reuters) and video results appear in 70% of the top 100 listings (Marketing Week).

– Video SEO is not throwing a video on YouTube and hoping it goes viral.

– If you host video on your site you can use it for blogger outreach and use embed codes, social media, YouTube and direct content to spread awareness.

– Each video you produce needs its own separate URL and landing page.

– To get more exposure you can repurpose the content in your video with transcripts, presentations, PDF downloads, podcasts or screenshots as images.

– You need a video site map and should add schema as google are now using it for video.

– Posting a video to YouTube or other sites, is an easy way to get in to universal search results and build brand awareness.

– Register your video with YouTube paid promotions to enable ads. You can then advertise on your videos with external calls to action.

Your Time to Shine Following on from last year’s hugely successful Your Time to Shine session, three more speakers took up the gauntlet of delivering presentations in bite sized chunks.

– Koozai’s Mike Essex spoke about the power of using freebies to build your brand, get links and sell more. This included giving away free products, free information, free help and free money. Mike’s slides will be posted to the Koozai blog this week.

– The next presentation featured a very special guest from a galaxy far far away. Chewbacca spoke about why Google would be better if it ignored anchor text and why he hates George Lucas.

– In the final talk Koozai’s Anna Lewis gave her second talk of the day, and ran people through the new version of Google Analytics, taking questions from the audience on other analytics issues.

• Search Monitoring – how to track what people are searching for on your site • Social Share Buttons – the easiest and fastest social media sharing buttons • Sexy Buttons – how to create great-looking call-to-action buttons with WordPress • Static Websites – how to make WordPress static

– There are always more URLs than Google can fetch, so they try to get as many as possible without destroying your website. To do this they use a relaxed crawl rate.

– Google increase the URL crawl rate slowly and see if response time goes up. If your site can’t handle the crawler they will not crawl much of your site.

– Googlebot can be blocked from accessing your server, so you need to make sure your hosts have no issues or they will think your site is down.

– Google crawl more pages than those in your sitemap but it does help them decide which pages are more popular.

– Setup email forwarding on webmaster tools as a priority – this is very important so you don’t miss any error messages.

– Make sure your 404 page delivers a 404 status – or it will get indexed which happens a lot.

– Google has to pick the best URL and title for your content. They can change it to better match the query. They then generate a snippet and site links. Changing them improves the CTR. It’s as if you are writing a different title for each query

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3 Comments

In terms of “scraping” that point is referring to pulling off a list of blogs so you have them set out in a spreadsheet – not stealing content from their websites which is absolutely something we would never suggest nor would Jon.

What do you think?

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